Greenbelts are the best-known growth management policies in Germany. As part of its regional plans, they attempt to keep undeveloped areas permanently open, thus avoiding sprawling, i.e., land consumptive forms of urban development. However, the effectiveness of such land use designations in terms of guiding and limiting urban growth has rarely been the subject of in-depth research. This is the first study to present a GIS-based analysis of the restrictiveness of greenbelt designations in Germany and their impact on urban spatial structure and land use.

Land use change models are powerful tools that allow planners and policy makers to assess the long-term spatial and environmental impacts of their decisions. In order for these models to produce a realistic output, they should be properly calibrated. This is usually achieved by comparing simulated land-use maps of dates in the past to reference land-use maps of a corresponding date. As land-use data are often not readily or frequently available, we propose a two-stage calibration framework that includes existing land-use maps as well as remote sensing derived maps of the urban extent.

Complex changes in carbon sources and sinks caused by rapid urbanization have been observed with extensive changes in the quantity, structure, and spatial pattern of land use types. Based on the modified Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach model and on gray relational analysis, we analyzed the influence of land use changes on carbon sinks and emissions in Guangzhou from 2000 to 2012. The aim was to identify suitable options for built-up land expansion that would allow for minimal carbon losses.

The study aims to assess the market for low and middle income housing finance in Bangladesh and identify the demand trajectory of this segment over the next 4 years. In addition, the report identifies factors that constrain the housing finance from serving low and middle income households.

Biological treatment, composting, in particular, is a relatively simple, durable and inexpensive alternative for stabilizing and reducing biodegradable waste. Co-composting of different waste sources allows to enhance the compost nutrient value. In particular, integration of ‘biosolids’ from the sanitation sector as potential input material for co-composting would provide a solution for the much needed treatment of fecal sludge from on-site sanitation systems, and make use of its high nutrient content.

Low-impact development (LID) comprises a broad spectrum of stormwater management technologies for mitigating the impacts of urbanization on hydrological processes. Among these technologies, green roofs are one of the most adopted solutions, especially in densely populated metropolitan areas, where roofs take up a significant portion of the impervious surfaces and land areas are scarce.

Agriculture accounts for most of the renewable freshwater resource withdrawals in Malawi, yet food insecurity and water scarcity remain as major challenges. Despite Malawi’s vast water resources, climate change, coupled with increasing population and urbanisation are contributing to increasing water scarcity. Improving crop water productivity has been identified as a possible solution to water and food insecurity, by producing more food with less water, that is, to produce “more crop per drop”.

The formation of ‘Urban Networks’ has become a wide-spread phenomenon around the world. In the study of metropolitan regions, there are competing or diverging views about management and control of environmental and land-use factors as well as about scales and arrangements of settlements. Especially in China, these matters alongside of regulatory aspects, infrastructure applications, and resource allocations, are important because of population concentrations and the overlapping of urban areas with other land resources.

One of the most prominent consequences of rapid urbanization has recently been the disintegrated distribution of municipal services which predisposes inequality in citizens' benefiting from these services. Therefore, the city planners and managers' main goal must be to achieve the ideal of 'equality of opportunities' to help different groups of urban population have access to public services and eliminate conflicts in the provision of opportunities.

As a result of the growing impacts on global environments, it has become important for land use planners to extract, detect, monitor and predict land use/cover changes (LUCCs). The monitoring of LUCCs within a certain time period and predicting future trends of temporal and spatial changes are absolutely necessary. The aim of this research was to analyze and monitor LUCCs in Naghadeh County, Iran over a time span of 27 years and predict the future trend of changes during the period of 2014–2041.

Rapid economic and population growth exert profound effects on land use/cover change, especially in rapid economically developing areas, such as Guangdong Province-a pioneer of economic growth and urbanization in China.